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LAUSD, other Calif. districts seeking their own NCLB waiver

Calif. districts team up to push school improvements

Frustrated by their own state's pace and direction of school improvement, eight California districts have banded together to move ahead on rolling out the Common Core State Standards and designing new teacher evaluations based in part on student performance.

"What they are doing is quite innovative," said David N. Plank, the executive director of Policy Analysis for California Education, or PACE, a nonpartisan research center run by Stanford University, the University of California, Berkeley, and the University of Southern California, in Los Angeles. "The districts are not in the same region, they are diverse in every dimension, and they are working strategically together to learn from one another and make constructive changes. It is critically important as an example of where the rest of the state needs to go."